Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how to get rid of my attachment to results. Coming from a background of being a competitive athlete, I've always been conditioned that how good you are is a directly related to how hard you work and the dedication of your training. When I trained hard, my hard work payed off and I won and beat others who might have slacked off at practice. I always had Alexander Karelin's motto "train like a madman" written all over my training journals (Google him if you don't know who he is, he's a beast). Learning poker has been a lot harder for me than picking up a physical skill. When learning something physical, you get direct feedback and you can make adjustments and quickly figure out what you need to do. Let's take riding a bike for example. You get on. Push the pedals. Fall down a couple times. Then you figure out you need to keep the wheel straight (omg i'm so punny) etc and you need to keep pedaling or else you fall. Eventually you figure it out. We all did.

Now think about how hard it would be to learn how to ride a bike if your results were not directly correlated with your actions. Lil baby Mushmellow gets on his new bike and Mama and Dadda Mush are watching and cheering him on. Unfortunately, Lil baby Mushmellow has a pretty weird bike and it rewards him randomly with a certain expectation based on how he tries to operate it. He pushes the pedals and starts rolling and then the seat ejects him. Was he pedaling the bike correctly and just got unlucky that the seat decided to eject him or was he riding it wrong? He won't really know until he rides the bike a million times and sees the true expectation of his actions. But by that time, he will already be too bruised up to want to keep riding the bike.

This is sort of what learning poker has been like for me. I'm on some sort non-deterministic bike and I keep getting ejected while I still have my training wheels on. Shown is my most recent batch of hands almost all of them are 25nl heads up. I'd have to say this is some of the most solid poker I've ever played in my life. Most of the beginning of the graph was me playing my A game and only did I drop into B and C game in the valley after spike where the green one starts to split from the yellow line. Today's session I resumed my A game and I think what helped was that I told myself "I'm just going to play my best and make sure to quit if I don't have a good edge and leave my ego at the door." Leaving the ego at the door for me usually means not checking the cashier until the end of the session. Whenever I'm playing my A game I never even think about how much I'm up or down, but when I'm not at my best I start to think about how much I've lost and it distracts me from being 100% in the moment while I'm playing.

I have to admit that recently I was a little bit irked by the fact that I've been running 18.5 buy ins below EV. I almost felt like giving up on my goals because I felt like I had just been thrown off the bike too many times. Losing was starting to affect my personal life as I think I subconsciously associate my results with my sense of self. Then, I realized. Why am I letting a random generator on some Isle of Man control my poker experience and my life experience? I thought to myself, if I ran 20 buy ins above EV would I be working on improving my game as much as I am now? No. Probably not. I would get cocky and think I was the shit. In contrast, why am I feeling bad about myself and doubting my game when dealing with what is basically (after rakeback) a 13k hand breakeven stretch?

Regardless of how we run, good or bad, it seems like people are affected too much by short-term results and it can even cause them to alter a previously formulated long-term battle plan. During one of my losing sessions, I did something which was pretty bad which was I clicked away from the Micro tab in the lobby to the Low tab and browsed the 50NL heads up games. This brief thought of playing out of my bankroll (which in my opinion is giving up and throwing in the white flag, by leaving the game more up to luck than you should) is a sign of mental game fishyness.

Has anyone else had any experiences with having the randomness of poker affect their learning of the game, day to day life, or decisions at the table? I'm looking for some advice and words of wisdom to help me push through this rough stretch of cards. This is when my mental game has been tested the most. I've been keeping a poker journal (as recommended in Jared Tendler's book, Mental Game of Poker) and have been doing poker warm ups and cool downs before my sessions. I've been marking hands for review in game and analyzing them post session. I've been focusing on quitting good players (table selection is one of my biggest weaknesses) and have been recording the people I quit and in how many hands and have been trying to beat my personal bests for quitting people and table selection. I've been talking through my hands as I play and making sure to focus on my breathing and have been playing in a completely silent environment free from external distractions. On the technical side of the game, I've been trying to extract more value from the fish and go for profitable bluffs when the situation calls for it. I've also been keeping fit and doing the Insanity workout during my lunch break at work. What more can I do to improve? Does anyone have any personal experiences to share about some of the harder times (mentally) they faced at the poker table and how you dealt with it?

Cheers!